Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Any Unit which suffers a Wound must make a Suppression Test at the end of the Phase. A Suppression Test is a form of Leadership Test. Make the Leadership Test with the following modifiers:
• The Leader may always test with a +1 bonus. (Suppression is not as serious as a Break Test.)
• If the Unit was Wounded by a Suppressive weapon, it suffers a -1 penalty for each level of Suppressive the Weapon has. If the Unit was wounded by weapons with different Suppressive values, use the highest Suppressive value to determine this penalty
• If the Unit was Wounded by Suppressive weapons from multiple Units in the same phase, it suffers a -1 penalty for each additional Unit whose Suppressive Weapon wounded them.

The last line used to read:

·If the Unit was Wounded by multiple, different Suppressive
weapons, it suffers a -1 penalty for each additional weapon that wounded them.

I decided this was undesirable. Some Units will contain multiple Suppressive weapons, such as a tank armed with more than one machine gun or a mortar squad with multiple mortars. It seems to me that the Suppressive effect of such weapons should lie in the rating of weapon's special characteristics, rather than the number employed. None the less, I want to increase the Suppressive effect of firing on a unit from more than one direction or with multiple units.

The downside of this approach lies in the fact that a single large unit, with multiple Suppressive weapons will be less effective than several small Units with the same number and type of weapons. There's some justification in this effect: increasing the volume of fire from a single direction(or Unit) is probably less Suppressive than an additional attack from another direction (Unit) on the target.

In an earlier stage of the game, I used a completely scalable system. Suppression occurred if a unit took a number of Wounds equal to half its numbers. Wounds from Suppressive weapons counted double (or triple, etc). This was very similar to FoW's five-hit rule. I abandoned this system, to tie Suppression more closely to Leadership, and to simplify the record-keeping involved. (No need to count all those Wounds.)

In all matters of game design, however, there is a trade off, and I wonder now if the old system was better.

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

Your Force is divided into Core and Support Choices. For the Martian Colonists, the Core of a Platoon-level Force always consists of one Officer, his Command Squad and 2-3 Squads.

Your Support Choices represent other units attached to or temporarily supporting your Lieutenant and his Platoon. Your Support choices vary depending on whether you are the Attacker or the Defender in the scenario you're playing. Attacking Forces have more aggressive and mobile choices; Defending forces get more guns and fortifications. In addition, Attacking Forces get 150% of the points a Defending Force gets, to compensate for the difficulty of making an assault.

(In case you're wondering, two Forces meeting each other in a symmetrical scenario both count as attacking, and have equal point levels.)

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Let us continue our guided tour of the Colonist book. The second Core entry is for Officers and Command Squads.

You use this entry to purchase Officers, regardless of their rank. Exactly which rank your Officer has will depend on what level of force you're playing with. A platoon level force will have one Lieutenant. A Company level force will have a Captain and two to three Lieutenants.

Each Officer is accompanied by a Command Squad of 2-5 Soldiers. These model represent aides, runners, bodyguards, and the like. They follow the Officer around and when he Attaches to a Squad, they Attach too. They may have a few options, such as SMGs, a Truck or Half-Track, depending on the Quality of your force. So the Command Squads and their extra weapons and bodies can bolster squads on the battlefield.

However, this is not their main purpose. Instead, the Officers are most useful for activating your force's Doctrines. There are some Doctrines that only Officers can activate, such as the ability to recover immediately from a failed Leadership test. Therefore, it is important to keep your Officers alive and place them near the Squads you want to stay in the fight, or whose abilities you most want to improve.